Meg Brown Payson
Dancing around a flat table, Meg Brown Payson pours, traces, blots, dilutes, and scrapes paint over panel in a process she calls “the search for a painting.” Payson works in several sizes: the smaller paintings resemble imagined worlds of aquatic material or microscopic particles, while the larger paintings present deep spaces of floating matter with colors and textures reminiscent of batik dye. In both scales she builds layers of circular forms, inspired by Celtic patterns and Australian Aboriginal dream paintings that intersect and connect within the frame and are moored in space by rigid vertical lines. The resulting images reveal Payson’s attempt to create coherence and order amidst chaos - as the layers build, balance emerges from the initial disorderly conditions. Payson avers “each painting is a single moment of order in a continuous field of possible orders.” She is “fascinated by the human need to construct meaningful order in a world filled with too much information” and her process of accumulation and erosion creates layers that reflect what she sees as the instability of meaning in the world. This sifting for inner significance through the phenomena of science and movement underline Payson’s desire to discover the underlying essence or metaphysical presence in the surrounding world.
Meg Brown Payson resides in Freeport, ME
Image: Meg Brown Payson, Dark Garden : 8/05.1 , 2005, acrylic on panel, 7” x 7”, Lent by the Artist
